Pocket Computer Could Someday Eliminate Passwords

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How much easier would your day-to-day technological interactions
be — logging on to your Facebook and Twitter pages, your email,
your bank account — if you never had to remember another
password, ever?

Frank Stajano, a University of Cambridge computer science
researcher, envisions such a utopia, and he has an idea to get us
there. It's called "Pico," a tiny portable computer capable of
acting as an authenticator for thousands of different devices and
services, Andy Greenberg from Forbes
reported.

In his paper, "Pico: No more passwords!" which he presented at
last week's USENIX security conference, Stajano explained that
Pico would be small device with a radio and camera that would use
cryptography to create and store keys for every device it needed
to authenticate.

"When it authenticated with those pieces of hardware or software,
the Pico's camera would read a visual code on a login screen or
device to identify it, and then send out a message over its radio
to a remote login server, encrypting
a message to it that only the service would be able to decrypt
with a secret key," Greenberg explained.

As a final step, the remote server would send back a message to
the Pico computer that, once decrypted, would unlock the target.

"Pico replaces all passwords, not just Web ones, including screen
saver passwords, passphrases to unlock files on your local
computer and the PINs of standalone devices such as your car
stereo, burglar alarm, phone or smart cards," Stajano wrote in
his
paper.

He added that when using Pico, "the user no longer has to type
the damn password."

Certainly seems like a no-brainer: it would eliminate not only
the need to remember
dozens of different passwords, especially long, complex ones,
but it would also thwart malicious apps, keyloggers and Trojans
from stealing passwords. The traditional and rampant techniques
cybercriminals use to steal users' online credentials would
effectively be rendered obsolete.

There is one small problem. Pico doesn't exist. But it's
Stajano's vision that Pico will be developed and put into
widespread use.

"I have decided not to patent any aspect of the Pico design," he
wrote. "If you wish to improve it, build it, sell it, get rich
and so forth, be my guest."